With increasing popularity of mobile communication devices and fierce competition in the market place, manufacturers are constantly adding more functions to mobile communication devices to enhance product competitiveness. For instance, adding built-in digital cameras to mobile phones has become very fashionable in recent years.
As lean profile and light weight have become basic conditions of development for mobile communication devices, how to integrate the antenna and other functional modules in the limited space inside the mobile communication device and still meet the multiband operation requirements is an important issue that all mobile communication device makers now encounter. Take the highly popular mobile phone equipped with digital camera as an example, the internal antenna or digital camera functional modules are mostly located in the upper portion of the back side of the mobile phone. They have a high degree of overlapping. However, the known conventional techniques for the antenna and mobile communication devices, such as U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,614,400 and 6,717,548 concerning the antenna for mobile phone multiband operation, do not have a structural design for integrating the functional modules of the digital camera or other functional modules. U.S. patent application Nos. US2003/0125079 and US2004/0097262 disclose digital camera functional modules used on mobile phones that also adopt independent design and are installed in a specific location. They also do not offer an integrated design with the antenna. All this indicates that even in the highly competitive mobile phone market, a technique for integrating the antenna and functional modules is still not available.
As the antenna and other functional modules are usually designed independently and located separately, they result in a great waste of the limited space in the mobile communication device. Moreover, if they are located close to each other, electromagnetic interference occurs between the antenna and other functional modules, and the quality of the entire mobile communication device is affected.
Therefore how to integrate the antenna required in the mobile communication device and other function modules to meet the multiband operation requirements of the future mobile communication devices, and also enable other functional modules to function normally within the compact size of the mobile communication devices, are goals actively pursued in the industry.